The capacity and speed of communications systems may be increased by transmitting information in optical form over networks composed of optically transmissive nodes, fibers, and the like. High capacity optical communications systems require that many optical signals be frequency division multiplexed in the components of an optical network. Receivers must be configured such that a desired optical frequency or band of frequencies may be retrieved from a group of many optical frequencies. This necessitates the provision of suitable optical filters such as an optical channel adding/dropping filter for dropping a frequency component from a multiplexed signal composed of a large number of frequencies or, alternatively, substituting a frequency component that has the same carrier frequency as the original component but a different modulation. While U.S. Pat. No. 5,461,685 discloses an optical filter that employs two frequency routing devices, until now there has been no convenient approach to filtering the individual components from a multiplexed series of optical frequencies with only a single frequency routing device.